Review Summary

Quentin Tarantino's fourth movie, his first in six years, is astonishingly violent, intermittently fascinating and sometimes tedious. This may be the picture's most serious flaw, since it comes from a man whose worship of action movies from all over the world (but especially Asia) is evident in every frame. Also evident is his obsession with Uma Thurman: by far the most emotionally charged relationship in the movie is the one between the director and his star, who functions as his muse, idol, alter ego and fetish object. Her character, the Bride, is a former assassin whose former lover (that would be Bill) tried to kill her on her wedding day. In this film, the first installment in a two-part revenge epic, the Bride wakes up from a 4-year coma and goes after the hired swords and guns who attacked her. Most of the exposition has been left for Volume Two; this one is an anthology of increasingly violent sequences, some sickening, some rather thrilling, that culminates in a Tokyo nightclub bloodbath during which Lucy Liu, playing a petite yakuza boss, shows off her Japanese, and also (quite literally) her brains. — A. O. Scott